Parsha Blog

Parshat Bo: Even God Makes a Mess of Things Sometimes

by

I was helping someone move into their new home this week.  They pre-warned me that I would be walking into a mess. Lots of boxes, lots of chaos, piles of things waiting to be organized.  I thought of my life and whether or not being in the midst of a mess bothers me. I decided…it depends.

I always have a mess in my car.  I consider my car a big purse on wheels.  If I were stranded somewhere for a while, I could exist on what is in my car – pillow, blanket, dental floss, lots of books and…yes…emergency popcorn.  It is a purposeful mess, in that I know where everything is and why it’s there. To others, it’s messy, to me it’s organized chaos. If you move anything around in my car, I won’t understand where and why you put ‘that thing’ where you did, so I will now be confused. Once, years ago, I got into my car one morning only to find it had been broken into.  Nothing was taken (I never leave valuables in my mess). How did I know it was broken into? The thieves left piles of things they had gone through searching for anything worthwhile. My stuff is never in piles – that’s how I knew. For neighbourhood statistics, I reported it to the police who kept asking if there was any damage to anything. I finally had to admit that the thieves left it neater than they found it.  Not my best moment.

When we encounter a mess, it is our inclination to tidy it or find ‘method to the madness’.  We don’t ever intend to create chaos. It’s actually really difficult to do.

Have you ever intentionally tried to make a mess?  I don’t mean have you ever ended up with a mess, but have you ever tried to make a mess?  Most often, a mess is the result of trying to do something else.  It’s easy to make a mess when you try to cook something, or when you’re trying to fix something.  I can’t actually think of a situation when the goal is to make a mess and nothing else. In fact, we usually ask people not to leave a mess behind them – our goal is anti-mess.

We come by this honestly, so much in Judaism is about ordering chaos. Whether it’s the beginning of Genesis, where God is ordering chaos, our prayer book, a Siddur (which translates as ‘Order’), or the Seder (‘the Order’) at Pesach, our model is to organize everything around us.  Even our texts are formatted on each page so there is order to the commentaries. We are never presented with disarray.

So, if everything is about ordering chaos, we come to this week’s Torah reading, parshat Bo, we read about the plagues God brings to Egypt, and we have to ask…what’s going on?  If the goal is to get us out of Egypt, surely God can do that in an instant without bothering anyone. Sitting on the wings of eagles comes to mind. In other words, why have plagues?

Maybe Egypt needs to be punished for what it did.  Except, God never mentions punishing Egypt as a goal when he enlists Moses to lead.  In fact, we are so bothered by the plagues that during the Seder we take wine out of our cups when we recite them because we are reducing our joy.  We are troubled by those plagues enough that we have to ask: why have them?

If we go back to the job God describes to Moses, we notice that there are two parts to it.  The first is the one we all know: get Israel out of Egypt. The second goal is the lesser known one: all of Egypt must know that God is God.  Basically, change Egypt’s world view. Get Pharaoh to acknowledge that he, in fact, is not a deity and they’ve had it wrong all along. When Moses insists to God that he doesn’t want the job, I believe he’s rejecting the second goal.  When you’re dealing with a powerful God, the first part of the task is easy. It’s when you’re dealing with people’s attitudes that the task becomes unimaginable. How can Moses possibly change Pharaoh’s mind?

And so God proceeds to undo creation in Egypt.  Each plague will remove another element of the creation of the world, and Egypt will be plunged back into primordial chaos.  For example, the first thing created in Genesis is light. It lasts for three days as a unique light of creation that the Sages describe as light that can be felt.  Undoing this light results in the plague of darkness in Egypt. The darkness lasts for three days and is described as a darkness that is heavy upon the person. It can be felt.  

But the most obvious example of God’s message is the last plague: the death of the first born.  The opposite of God creating the first person. The undoing of life. God breathed life into Adam and God will pass through Egypt taking the breath out of every first born.  

The message now becomes: only the God who created the universe would know how to undo it.  God is deliberately putting chaos back into Egypt with the goal of having them realize God is the One who created it all.  The plagues trouble us because they weren’t meant to speak to us and, in the end, they don’t.

Judaism is a model of order from chaos and organization from disarray, but not all of God’s messages are meant for us. The Torah always lets us know that God has relationships with all people and all beings.  How humbling to realize that the redemption from Egypt, the pivotal moment in creating the Jewish people, is framed with unique and monumental events that were never meant to speak to us.

Parshat Va’era: But Shoes Are Shoes…Aren’t They?

by

I spent some time this week focusing on the Mussar value of ‘Hakarat hatov’ – recognizing the good.  We often reduce it to the expression ‘thank you’ and file it under gratitude. Actually, to be honest, we often say ‘thank you’ and file it under ‘things I do when triggered by something that doesn’t have too much relevance or meaning anymore’.  In other words, things I say when I’m in automatic.

There is a foundational value in Judaism of recognizing the good, reframing ourselves to view things positively.  We are commanded to choose life, we are also told to do things from within a place of joy and, most obviously, we toast to life.  We are cautioned to stay away from the dark negative places both physically and mentally. Finding the darkness within us and others comes too naturally to us because, on a very base level, it keeps us safe.  If I expect the worst, then I am prepared for it, whereas if I expect the best, I could easily be blindsided and hurt.

So, in the first steps of recognizing the good, we are taught to say ‘thank you’.  But the nuances of thanking someone are huge when we recognize how it opens endless explorations of our perspective.

When I was potty training my kids, each of them reacted differently.  One of them chose to completely ignore the potty sitting in the middle of the room and defiantly chose to use the floor right next to it. The message was clear: ‘I can control this, but I will choose where and when’ – message quickly received.  Another of my kids explained to me that they know I want them to use the potty but they prefer their diaper (those are the exact words used as they felt they needed to explain to me why this is a doomed venture and I somehow don’t get it).  But one of my children thanked me each and every time. 

With this child, I would remind him of the potty as clearly as I could.  Often, that would take the shape of my saying ‘do you have to pee’ every few minutes and his answering “no, thank you.”  It was never just a yes or no answer, it was always followed with a ‘thank you’. I couldn’t tell if I should correct him because I wasn’t sure it was incorrect.  He somehow heard my question to him as an invitation, or maybe he heard my question as a consideration of him. I’m not sure, but without doubt his ‘thank you’ made me explore what my question meant.  Was I worried about having to clean up a mess next to the potty? Was I worried that he would never train and would somehow be marching down the aisle to his chuppah in a diaper? Was I worried that if he didn’t train by a certain age then I had failed as a mother?  Was I worried about him or me?

He gifted me the ‘thank you’ because he heard me inviting him to an action.  He heard that I had extended to him with consideration. His ‘thank you’ humbled me and I have never treated gratitude the same way since then.

This week’s parshah, Va’era, has Moses and Aaron in Egypt and the plagues begin.  But Moses is not the one to start the plagues, it is Aaron who turns the Nile into blood and it is Aaron who brings frogs from the Nile.  We know that when it comes to Torah, it is rare to see agreement in the commentaries, but in this instant there is agreement. Moses cannot harm the Nile, it must be Aaron.

While the Nile represented the instrument of death for the baby boys of Egypt, for Moses alone, it was a place of refuge and safety.  The Nile could have upturned the little ark Moses was floating in, but it did not. It kept him safe and brought him to the hands of Pharaoh’s daughter, the woman who would save him.  Moses cannot harm the Nile because he must show gratitude to its waters.

But is the Nile a living thing?  Must we show gratitude to inanimate objects? Interestingly, Judaism says we must.  There was a sage in the Talmud who would wrap his shoes carefully before discarding them.  When asked by his students why, he explained that those shoes kept his feet from harm for years and so he will treat them with respect to show his gratitude.  Of course, the shoes don’t know…but he does.

There was a rabbi who headed a yeshiva in Jerusalem in the 1980s.  His name was Rabbi Yisrael Zeev Gustman. He was the last ‘dayan’ (rabbinical judge) in Vilna before the Holocaust and when he fled, he hid in the forests.  Upon establishing his yeshiva after the war, he insisted that he, and only he, be the gardner of the grounds. Some students felt it was not respectful to have him fill that role and he answered, “my life was saved by the shelter of the bushes and the fruit of the trees”.  He said that he was expressing gratitude to the forest that sheltered him. The trees will never know…but he will.

So, Jewish environmentalism is not based on the logical argument not to poison the nest we live in.  That is an argument of self-interest. Jewish environmentalism sits on the idea of ‘Hakarat hatov’, gratitude.  We are forbidden to harm something that has treated us so well, that has fed us and sheltered us and quite literally given us the air we breath.  We are commanded to take care of the earth because it is how we say thank you.

And the Talmud takes it even further.  There is a verse in the book of Deuteronomy that commands us not to despise the Egyptian because we were a stranger in his land.  In other words, before Egypt enslaved us, we were welcomed in and fed during a famine. The Torah tells us we must not hate them, but the Talmud tells us we must never harm them.  Now it is not only about how we should feel but it is also about how we act toward them.  

Except, are we supposed to simply erase the sufferings and the torture of slavery?  Of course not. Human suffering is never to be ignored, but should the pain of it be perpetuated?  The Torah tells us to learn from our Egypt experience. Never treat the stranger badly, never turn away someone in need.  But our suffering in Egypt ended, we were brought to freedom and the Torah tells us we were paid before we left. In other words, learn what we need to learn from the suffering in order to create a positive future.  Carry the lesson forward, not the hatred.

The opportunities to ‘recognize the good’, the moments that slip by us and are then lost, but with a simple thought to gratitude, we could change so much.  Maybe the next time a guest thanks us for our hospitality, instead of automatically saying ‘you’re welcome’, we could stop ourselves and sincerely express, ‘thank you for your visit.’

Because He Dared to Dream

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a good week.  I’ve spent a few days hearing about strange dreams.  Not the kind that come from daydreams and zoning out but actual dreams.  A young woman I know is expecting her first baby and is starting to have very strange dreams. They are shocking to her and a bit frightening and so I have been reassuring her that everything is fine and that pregnancy brings about strange dreams.  This week’s parshah, Vayeshev, is filled with Joseph’s dreams and so my mind has been circling back and forth around dreams.

The Sages in the Talmud tell us that dreams are messages you send yourself.  It is then important to try and read those messages (somewhere Freud is dancing a hora).  The Sages then repeat in several different places that the power of the dream never lies within the dream itself, it lies within the interpretation of the dream.  It is not the content of the message that will matter, it is how we hear it. Put another way, meaning does not rest within a book, it rests within the reader.

When I was teaching Tefillah in kindergarten, we were discussing the morning prayer of ‘Modeh Ani’.  The first words uttered when opening our eyes in the morning is to thank God for returning my soul to me.  Of course, the kids all ask where their souls went at night that now they’re back. The conversation pretty much centred around God showing our souls wonderful things when we sleep as a reward for the good things we do.  One kid asked if nightmares are then a punishment for bad things we do. Everyone agreed that nightmares are punishment (ah, if the world could only stay as black and white as this). But one kid objected and said that dreams can’t be punishments.  Nightmares are when God takes our souls and shows them the things that scare us the most so we can see them when we’re safe in our beds and together with God. That answer has stuck with me all these years. This is why the Sages tell us to learn Torah from children.

Interestingly, the Talmud also mentions that our souls journey at night and bring us dreams of things we have never seen or hear languages we have never learned.  In the Talmud, we journey with angels.

I can’t help but think of Joseph and his two dreams.  The Torah tells us that Joseph and his brothers don’t get along.  It’s only made worse by the ‘special’ robe Jacob gives him. It’s not a multi-coloured robe, it’s striped.  That actually makes all the difference. A richly coloured robe would designate royalty while a striped robe designates being the heir.  Jacob has designated Joseph as his heir because he is first born of Rachel, the loved wife. Of course his brothers will hate him now – it is a terrible insult to them, but most importantly, to their mother, Leah, the first wife.  Insulting someone personally is minuscule in comparison to insulting their mother. The Torah tells us they cannot ever speak a kind word to Joseph.

And so Joseph dreams his dreams.  The first one has him working with his brothers in the fields as they bind sheaves.  He says the brothers’ sheaves circled his and bow. The brothers are appalled and blame him for dreaming that they should serve him.  Things get worse between them, which leads us to the crucial question: why would he then tell them of a second dream?

Joseph returns to his brothers and describes a second dream where the sun, the moon and stars are bowing to him.  He also tells his father this dream. Everyone gets mad at him. How dare he think that the family would worship him?  Jacob seems to understand that the sun and the moon represent himself and Rachel, except some commentaries point out that Rachel has already died so Jacob’s interpretation could not be true.  In other words, maybe the problem isn’t the dream, it’s that it’s being wrongly interpreted.

What if Joseph isn’t dreaming a dream of worship but rather a dream of welcoming.  In the ancient world people bow to each other to welcome each other more commonly than to worship.  Joseph’s first dream has him working with his brothers, sharing a common activity in the field. Maybe their sheaves surrounded him in an image of inclusion and then bow with a gesture of welcome.  Maybe the brothers have entirely missed what he was trying to tell them and so he tries telling them again with a second dream. He tries to tell his father how isolated he is feeling.

When everything backfires so badly, Joseph doesn’t stop dreaming, he just stops telling them about it.  They never get past feeling insulted by the striped coat and so it is the insult that is dictating the interpretations.  The dreams trigger Joseph being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Only when Joseph masters interpreting dreams will he rise to great power in Egypt.

The key is not in the dreams, it is in how we choose to hear them.  We have two options: the first is to accept the brothers’ interpretations and conclude Joseph was self-centred, ego-driven and thoughtless.  The second option is to question their interpretation and conclude the brothers could not put aside feeling insulted in order to hear a genuine appeal coming their way.  

We learn nothing from the first option.  The second option makes us question how often we allow a perceived insult to block us from hearing an authentic plea.  

Dreams are messages we send ourselves, they are journeys of the soul. We must read them with care, and when we hear the dreams of others, we must always hear the person speaking the dream before we hear the dream.

C’est La Guerre

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  My week was filled with classes winding down and celebrations winding up.  My weekly Torah and Mussar classes are taking a break for a few weeks and, as Chanukah is approaching, some of the schools and shuls are starting to have Chanukah inspired events.

In one of those moments, I was walking through the halls of a Jewish day school in Toronto. I had the pleasure of standing next to a line up of kindergarten kids waiting to go out for recess.  They must have just finished a class in Torah, since they were all talking about God speaking to Abraham and Sarah. They were wondering what language God was speaking. Intrigued, I stood a little closer.  One of them said God spoke Hebrew and English. They all agreed and stood quietly for a minute. Then one kid said they forgot one language that God was speaking. They forgot that God was speaking French to Abraham.  I stood quietly as they all agreed that, yes, of course, God was speaking French!

The kids ran out to recess and I was left in the hallway wondering how, on earth, they had such unanimous agreement that the Almighty Creator of the Universe was speaking French to Abraham and Sarah.  Then it hit me clearly. God was speaking Hebrew, English and French because we teach them Hebrew, English and French. For non-Canadian readers, quick reminder that Canada has two official languages: English and French. Both are taught starting in elementary school.  The beauty of the conversation in the hallway was that six year olds were reflecting what we all feel: why would we learn something if it’s not relevant to us?

So, I can’t help but think about a moment in this week’s parshah, Vayishlach.  We read the text where Jacob wrestles with an angel and is renamed Israel. It’s beautiful, it’s meaningful, it’s mystical…but when’s the last time you wrestled with an angel and got a new name?  How is it relevant to me in anything I do?

But, the Torah doesn’t say Jacob is wrestling with an angel, it says he’s wrestling with ‘a man’.  Jacob, himself, isn’t sure who he’s wrestling with and, in the end, concludes he wrestled with God.  Hosea, the prophet, says the man was an angel and we have accepted Hosea’s understanding. There are midrashim and commentaries that discuss which angel Jacob struggles with, while others explore the idea that Jacob is actually wrestling with himself – we are witness to a primal, internal struggle of identity and transformation.  And there lies the relevance.

The incident occurs the night before Jacob meets his twin brother, Esau, after years of estrangement.  Jacob tricked his brother out of his birthright and will now face Esau and be held accountable for his actions.  Everything is on the line and Jacob must now confront his past. He struggles with the entity no one is able to name.  

There are moments in all our lives when we face things we’ve done in the past. Choices we ourselves may not fully understand or be proud of.  Things that occurred in the past, yet somehow lay in wait for us in future moments. Things we continually revisit and struggle with. It doesn’t matter if the moments are embodied within an external angel, or within our internal subconscious, because the wrestlings with these moments are real.  In fact, we have all been Jacob on a dark, quiet night, struggling with an unknown being.

And then the resolution is powerful.  The ‘angel’ blesses Jacob with a new name: Israel.  The word itself is explained as struggling with God and humanity with the ability to prevail.  It is an understanding of the nature and strength of the man, and the nation, who will bear that name.  But the word ‘Israel’ is also the initials of all the ancestors: the 1st letter is for Yitzchak and Ya’akov, the 2nd for Sarah, the 3rd for Rebecca and Rachel, the 4th for Abraham and the last for Leah.  In Judaism, names are essence and so the essence of our ancestors lies within the name of our people, within our identities. It is who we all have been and where we all come from.

But the very same word speaks of the future and authenticity of how we express.  The word that tells us who we were is the same word that tells us we have the strength to be anything in the future.  We have been blessed with the strength to argue and defend the journey we choose, even if the argument is directly with God.

In that light, the text in this week’s parshah is possibly one of the most relevant.  In our dark moments, when we face ourselves and our unknown beings of struggle, we remember that we will always meet who we were, we will struggle, and then we will move forward to continuously shape ourselves into who we choose to be.  The blessing is in the struggle.

So, who am I to deny that in the midst of some ancient moment of angst and doubt, Abraham or Sarah turned to God and asked why things have to be so hard.  Maybe in the complexity of an ancient Divine explanation of the metaphysical workings of the universe…maybe somewhere in that moment… maybe God spoke French.

I’d Like A Double Water On The Rocks With A Twist Please

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a good week.  I’ve been having interesting conversations this week about technology and the generation that’s trying to find partners through it.  My kids and their friends have learned to navigate relationships by ‘swiping left or right’. The first time someone explained the term ‘ghosting’ to me, I was shocked.  Rather than having to find words to explain to someone why you’re not interested, you simply ignore them and, in fact, they will go away.

Everything seems to happen online and I can’t find the virtual ‘watering hole’ where singles can meet each other.  I remember going to pubs on dates and when I was a student I worked at pubs and watched others on their dates. Today, people still meet on dates, but first they have googled each other, so first dates are not a discovery of the other person but rather a validation of what they found online.  Everyone is at a distinct disadvantage.

I spent time in Israel as a student and I have interesting memories of dating there.  One date involved mulled wine in a unique hovel in the old city of Jaffa. There was no indoor plumbing, the bathroom was outside in a tiny closet shared by a courtyard of studio apartments.  I loved that nothing like that existed in Toronto. There were no seats, there were benches covered with blankets from the old city.

I was enjoying the wine and trying to look mysterious (I wanted to fit the atmosphere and perhaps have a second date) when I excused myself to find the washroom.  I found the outdoor ‘closet’ and squeezed myself in. As I was using the facility, I noticed there was a knob on the wall right in front of me. I am not one to ignore things I don’t know so, of course, I turned the knob. It activated the shower head that was directly above where I was sitting. The shared bathroom I was in doubled as a shower and I couldn’t turn it off for a few seconds until the shock of the moment passed and I realized how to turn it off.  I was drenched…and I was on a date.

I couldn’t leave without explaining why, since I didn’t want to offend my date, he had done nothing wrong (except taking me to a place with a bathroom from hell – yes, I blamed him for a few seconds there).  So I grabbed my sweater from my bag, bunned my hair and went back to the table as if nothing happened. He simply asked me if everything was ok and I said ‘yes, why?’

There was no second date.

In-person encounters are indispensable.  The Torah is full of couples meeting at watering holes.  Rebecca meets Eliezer at a well when she offers to draw water for his camels, as he is on a long journey.  He arranges for her to marry Isaac, who she first meets at a well where he has gone to get away from people for a bit.  And in this week’s Parshah, Vayetzei, Jacob meets Rachel at a well when he opens the well and draws water for her sheep.  The text tells us she is a shepherd (her day job) so essentially, Jacob meets her at the watering hole at work. Eventually, Moses will also meet his wife, Tziporah, at a well and she will bring him home with her.  It becomes tried and true.

Today, in the complex world of technological advancements and societal transformations, where is the virtual well, the watering hole?  Rebecca offered to help someone on their journey and Jacob offered to help someone with their job. Isaac goes to the well to find some quiet when he meets Rebecca and Moses is fleeing from harm when he meets his wife who brings him to family.  These ancient moments show us the complexities of those first few moments – the endless possibilities when we first meet someone unknown to us.

I never explained to my date why my hair was dripping and he never asked what happened.  We were not a good match since my curiosity would do that to me often. There’s only so long he could pretend not to notice.  

So perhaps dating should involve that leap of faith in allowing that people are more complex than their online profiles could ever capture.  If it’s someone you don’t know then there are definite realities in today’s world that need to be considered. There are safety concerns and the true sense that people can more easily misrepresent themselves today. So, as someone who didn’t have to deal with this ‘in my day’, I offer these words: try and focus on the real concerns when investigating a potential date online and leave latitude for the possibility of a wonderful surprise if you accept an offer to meet. Take advice from the ancient world: meet at a public watering hole, watch how they interact with strangers, people who are tired from their day at work or looking for a quiet moment.  

The internet allows us to accept or reject someone based only on what we see.  Whether it’s to meet a partner, a new friend or someone we’re considering for a job, the parshah reminds us that often what attracts us to each other is the chemistry in the air – but we have to sit together to feel it.

But If I Know That You Know That I Know…

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This week I had an interesting conversation with some of my kids about their friends who are expecting babies.  I realized childbirth stories that have passed down through the generations for countless millennia are somehow irrelevant to the childbearing families of today.  

Gone are the days when a woman would suspect she’s pregnant but have to wait for weeks before she could take a test to be certain.  The big innovation was that we no longer killed rabbits to diagnose a pregnancy. I learned the phrase ‘the rabbit died’ is now a gruesome and twisted image to an expectant couple. 

Today, pregnancies are announced on Facebook hours after conception.  The entire pregnancy is catalogued online, complete with regular baby bump selfies, diets, questions and suggestions.  It no longer takes a village to raise a child, apparently it takes a village to gestate one as well.

When I was pregnant with my first child I had an ultrasound (a new-fangled test in my day).  I was shown a black and white image of shapes and shadows that everyone called ‘the baby’. Technology developed quickly and by my fifth child I was given an ultrasound picture to take home with me.  It was a picture of shapes and shadows with a circle drawn on it and handwriting outside the circle that said ‘the baby’. I showed everyone the picture with joy and when a few people asked me if I could show them exactly where the baby was I would always point to the circle drawn around a blob.  In truth, I could have been holding an ultrasound of my left kidney.

These days I see ultrasound pictures of babies that are 3D with everything visible, including facial expression, hair and gender.  I’ve seen families gush over the pictures and comment on things like ‘he has the hands of a musician’ or ‘the legs of an athlete’.   There is an expectation that we rise to the challenge of having the most up to date, the latest and the greatest.  

My husband and I bought a swing for our first baby.  It was the ‘first generation’ of swings and needed to be wound up.  Everyone was discussing the latest information about how swings sooth the baby and will teach the baby to calm itself.  The swing’s mechanical casing sat just above the baby’s head. We somehow always managed to bean the baby in the head with it when carefully lifting her out of the swing.  Swing casing hits baby, baby wakes and screams, parent searches for head injury, baby goes back into swing, rinse and repeat…

We never stop to consider that the latest and greatest might not be the best.  So much information comes our way, we don’t have a chance to ask ourselves what kind of information is it?  Information that educates us is different than information that informs us which is different than information we should consider and, finally, information we should implement.  At first glance, we think it’s obvious, but information filters change everything.

As parents, we feel vulnerable and we default to thinking that the more information the better.  We feel most secure when we think we can choose our children’s destinies. Woody Allen used to say his birth announcement read: Mr. & Mrs. Allen are proud to announce the birth of their son, Dr. Woodrow Allen.

But we must never know our children’s destinies or we will raise them toward it.  In Judaism, our destinies are areas of negotiation – that is the meaning of Yom Kippur.  Locking into a vision of destiny creates a narrow view with no free will.

In this week’s parshah, Toldot, Rebecca is pregnant with twins and they are waging a war within her.  She seeks God to find out what is happening. God tells her that she is not carrying two babies but two nations who will live apart.  God tells her one will be mightier than the other and the elder will serve the younger. God tells her their destinies.

For the rest of her life Rebecca is left to wonder if God was describing the future or prescribing it.  Was she supposed to sit and watch it happen or was she supposed to actively make it happen?  In desperation, as time ticks away, she decides she must fulfill God’s words and enacts a plan to make it happen.  Rebecca doesn’t realize her sons had already traded their birthrights, it had already happened. Not knowing how to read the information she was given, Rebecca instructs Jacob to trick his father and a family will be torn apart.  The consequence of the wrong information filter causes Isaac to bestow ancient blessings, with national and land ownership implications of the region, that can still be felt in today’s world. When Isaac has full knowledge of what happened, he affirms his blessings but the family rift is complete.

The Torah commands us to behave a certain way and we take that information as authoritative and instructional.  But what do we do with the information that is more descriptive? When we are told we will be ‘a light onto the nations’, or ‘a holy people’, are we to understand that as our inevitable destiny (descriptive) or as a goal to actively journey toward (prescriptive)?  Do we consider it a birthright or a vision of possibility?

Rebecca prayed for information and God answered her prayer.  But the information alone resulted in divisiveness and enmity.  Not that long ago, fathers weren’t allowed in birthing rooms, it was considered information for women only.  Today, technology invites the world into every moment. The age of information triggers the need to understand that we know very little about how to use the information we access.  

So even when I know something in today’s world, I have to think back to our most ancient of texts and question if I actually know anything about what I know.

‘Pinky Swear’ Has Nothing On This 

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  I had an interesting adventure this week that involved a trip to Ikea, a 4 year old girl and confronting my own integrity.  It happened within seconds of entering an Ikea store. Between you and me, it happens to me within seconds every time I go into an Ikea store…I get lost.  To be clear, I enjoy the bright colours and the way things are set up so that I can leave the outside world outside for the time I spend in Ikea.  The problem is that the time I spend in Ikea gets longer and longer because I’m trying to find my way through the labyrinth of aisles and displays.  I follow the arrows on the floor and try and see the number codes hanging from the ceiling all at the same time. It results in my eyes quickly moving from floor to ceiling and back and forth until I wonder if it got dark outside yet.

A few days ago I had to take a family member with me, a little 4 year old girl.  I picked her up from school and we merrily sang of our ‘girl adventure’ to the furniture store.  I had pretzels waiting in the car for a fun snack and we held hands as we skipped into Ikea (ok, we didn’t really skip but you get the picture).

This Ikea was the same as any Ikea I’ve ever gone into in my city.  The ground entryway immediately leads to a staircase to the floor where the furniture displays begin.  We walked up the stairs and I stopped to get my bearings. I’m not sure what my facial expression was or if my hand stiffened as I held hers but something prompted this little cherubic 4 year old to tug on my hand and say: ‘are we lost?’

I immediately lied and said, ‘of course not’.  That’s when I confronted my own integrity and realized she deserved the truth.  I looked at her and said, ‘I’m always lost’ followed by a realization that I needed to provide context and added ‘in this store’.  I told her I would watch the signs on the ceiling if she could keep us going in the direction of the arrows on the floor. Team work, I thought – maybe I should tell her ‘team work makes the dream work’, or maybe I should just zip it and focus on the signs above.  Everything was working beautifully until I heard those dreaded words from her, ‘I need to pee’. I felt the blood drain to my feet.

All of this happened yesterday and since then I’ve been thinking about my moments of honesty and judgment in securing a little 4 year old without lying to her.  Then I wondered about what circumstances might indeed prompt me to lie to anyone and then I thought about being a woman in Judaism today and that I could never be called as a witness in an Orthodox court because women cannot be witnesses.  I can never sign as a witness on a Ketubah, as my signature would invalidate the document if it were ever needed in an Orthodox court. ‘But’, I said in my heart, ‘I tell the truth in Ikea! Why can’t I be a witness?’ And then I thought of this week’s parshah: Chayei Sarah.

In the parshah, Abraham makes his servant, Eliezer, take an oath.  In order to take the oath, Abraham tells him to place his hand under his thigh.  The oath is administered in that position. I remember learning this portion as a little girl in school and wondering what on earth could be so important about grabbing the back of your thigh.  I thought it made you look ridiculous. How much more noble to ‘raise your right hand’ like they did on the Perry Mason shows. I had one of my first questions of Jewish difference at that moment: just because we’re Jews doesn’t mean we have to do EVERYTHING so differently!  It wasn’t until decades later that I realized ‘under the thigh’ is where the testicles are – a nuance completely lost in my little girl Jewish world.

Taking an oath in the ancient world meant that a man would hold his manhood and symbolically put it on the line if he should break the oath.  He is now risking everything to fulfill the vow and therefore I can believe he will move heaven and earth to get it done. He is believed because he placed his hand ‘under his thigh’.  It certainly beats the childhood oath of ‘cross my heart and hope to die’ – a phrase every parent is horrified by. (By the way, as a child in a Jewish school we were all making ‘x’ signs on our hearts, it’s actually supposed to be a Christian cross on the heart – boy did we get that one wrong).

So, if a man takes an oath by risking his external maleness, how could a woman do anything comparable?  How would you believe a woman taking an oath, in the ancient world, if she cannot put up collateral to hold her to her word the way a man can?  It is a biologically skewed system of exclusion. But it’s not saying a woman can’t be believed, it’s saying we don’t have a comparable mechanism to administer.  That should all have changed in the modern world.

Today, no one goes into a court of law and grabs their genitals.  I dare say they might be found in contempt of court if they tried.  Women in a secular court are administered an oath the same way a man is and are held to the same legal standards.  But the Jewish courts never equalized things when the rabbinic courts introduced oath taking in God’s name. Clearly, no one goes into a Jewish court with the biblical ‘under the thigh’ gesture, everyone invokes God’s name to tell the truth.  Lying under those circumstances is the definition of “taking God’s Name in vain’, a commandment equally binding on men and women.

It’s time for women’s equal oath taking status to move through the Jewish world.  If a woman can bear witness without restriction in Judaism, then she can hold leadership roles without restriction as well, and that, I believe, is the political issue at stake that impedes this.

And just before we conclude how wonderfully modern and egalitarian our western secular world is, let’s not forget that a witness in our courts is called to ‘testify’ as they give their ‘testimony’, words that root back to a man being believed in his words because of what he holds in his hands under his thigh.

See?  I told you trips to Ikea are never as simple as they seem.

I Don’t Think We Could Ever Solve This One – Parshat Vayera

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This week’s parshah is Vayerah and it’s filled with controversy and some of the most challenging concepts in Judaism.  It contains the narrative of the binding of Isaac, the test that shatters all relationships, and it contains the Sodom narrative.

I think Jews will struggle with the binding of Isaac narrative for all time.  How could God ask Abraham to kill his son? How could Abraham have been willing to do so?  In willing to do so, does Abraham pass or fail the test? A labyrinth of theological dilemmas with no way out.  But on the other end of it is an outcome we must all be grateful for: Jewish children will be saved forever from ending up on religious altars.  Abraham introduces the sacrificial substitute of a ram and never again could a Jewish child end up on the altar of its parents.

But it costs everything.  The Torah doesn’t hide that God and Abraham never speak again.  Abraham and Isaac also never speak again and Sarah dies as a result of that moment on the mountain.  In one midrash, Isaac speaks his last words to his father, Abraham, and asks that after all is done and he is burned to ashes, he wants Abraham to collect his ashes and place them in a jar in his parent’s bed so he can sleep next to them forever.  Abraham asks his son, ‘what makes you think I’ll live through this?’  

That says it all.

But as a result of that heartbreaking moment, all Jewish children are forever safe from the altars of their parents.

And the Sodom narrative is no less challenging.  The brutality of the populace of Sodom is juxtaposed with the hospitality of Abraham’s tent.  The same strangers (angels) who are treated so beautifully in Abraham’s household are mistreated so horribly in Sodom, in Lot’s household.  The fact that the men of Sodom demand Lot’s guests be brought out so they may sexually abuse them is horribly answered by Lot offering his virgin daughters to the rape mob.  Another father thinking to sacrifice his children.  

Most challenging of all is the fact that it is the Lot narrative that will eventually give us final redemption, a messiah.  After Sodom is destroyed, Lot’s daughters believe God destroyed the world again (this is only 10 generations after the Flood of Noah’s ark).  Just like in the Noah story, the daughters believe God only saved 1 family (them) and therefore it is up to them to save humanity. Except…the only male left alive, they believe, is Lot, their father.  Thinking they have no choice and that this must be what God wants, they plan to become pregnant by their father. With God on their side (or so they believe), they get Lot drunk, lay with him and both become pregnant. In today’s world, when someone gets someone else drunk, with the intention of taking advantage of them, it’s called rape.  The irony is not lost on us that they do to Lot what he had offered that the mob do to them.  

One of the daughters bears a son named Moab.  The Moabite people will come from that baby and the Moabites will eventually give us Ruth.  Ruth gives us David and eventually David will give us the messiah. It all starts in Sodom – the epitome of the worst of human brutalities.  The Sages ask how such potential redemption can result from such terrible action. The answer lies in the intention of these women. With erroneous information they still intended to save everyone they could. Redemption begins with intention.

In another midrash, that always impacted me, God is speaking with Abraham and telling him that while searching the world entire, God has finally found the seeds of redemption.  Abraham says ‘tell me’ and God replies ‘they lay buried in Sodom’- they are deep within the intention and action of 2 young women.

Years ago, I was driving with one of my sons north of the city.  He was about 7 or 8 years old and we were talking about God. He was asking me where God lives and I was explaining how God could live everywhere.  We broke it down to his world and were finally concluding that, yes, God also lived in pockets. Suddenly he pointed at something outside and said that God lives everywhere but he thinks God lives mostly there.  He was pointing at an abandoned, broken down, dirty school bus sitting in a derelict field. I was baffled and asked him why God lives mostly there and he said: ‘because I would never go there, it’s too scary’.

Parshat Vayerah is filled with those scary places and scary moments and then shows us that God lives there.  We feel trapped by those theologies and our minds reel, but in the end we emerge knowing that on the other side of Abraham’s nightmare lies the safety of all our children.  

The Torah shows us again ‘that which enslaves us, redeems us.’

Don’t Make Me Turn This Car Around

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This morning I woke up a little more stiff than usual.  There’s snow on the ground, I thought, there’s pressure in the air.  Maybe I slept in a strange position or maybe I twisted awkwardly yesterday…

…or maybe it’s the result of waking up a day older.  In the words of that famous rock and roll visionary legend: ‘what a drag it is getting old.’

Actually, I believe that age is a state of mind (as the cliche goes).  Though I’m the first to admit that I believe this because I often forget how old everyone in my family is, so as age affects my memory, I opt to believe it’s a state of mind – and round I go.  

The movement forward, the aging process, the journey of a life.

In this week’s parshah, Lech Lecha, we are introduced to a journey that will seed covenant and begin the Jewish people.  God approaches Abraham to accompany God toward…? He is told they are moving toward a place God will show him, in other words, an unknown destiny.  That means he doesn’t know where he’s going, so he won’t know when he gets there – a journey of life.

Not once does Abraham ask ‘are we there yet’, as none of us would ask that question of our life journey, though we always try and imagine the next stage.  I remember being a little girl and getting so excited as every birthday approached because I was getting closer to being a grown up. I remember thinking that when I become a grown up, everything will make sense.  Grown ups have it all figured out and never feel confused. I couldn’t wait to join that club. The journey of life is realizing I’m still waiting to find that club and ultimately understanding that this elusive club doesn’t exist.

Hundreds of years ago, a Protestant minister wrote about his belief that children blame themselves for everything that goes wrong because they understand that the world is run by adults.  Everything wrong in the world must be the result of demons (thinks the child) and if the adults are responsible, then the adults are demons and the world is run by the devil. But, if the child blames themselves for all the problems, then the world, which is run by adults (who are now angels) is a safe place.  Children must blame themselves and think they are the sinful ones or they will never believe the world could be a safe place.

But we know the child is wrong, the world is a confusing and often painful place and it has been impacted tremendously by terrible people.

So it seems that the words of Mick Jagger ring sadly relevant – what a drag indeed.

But then a curious and quirky moment of Torah catches my attention.  

Sarah and Abraham are about to enter Egypt and they are both in their 80s.  Abraham worries that Sarah will be taken into Pharaoh’s harem because of her beauty.  In fact, she is indeed taken into the harem because of her beauty. We all pause and wonder if 80 years old means something different in those days.  What is the average age of the women in this harem?

And then I remember the cover of a newsmagazine I saw years ago.  It was the face of a woman in her 80s, her face, etched with wrinkles, looked like a roadmap of her life.  The headline indicated she was an African woman and considered the most beautiful woman in the region. The article discussed how beauty was defined by life experience and not youth.  In a second I understood that anyone would be honoured and flattered to be chosen by this woman as a partner since she had so much experience she could quickly discern who was an exceptional partner.  Beauty is in the gathering of experiences – the more wrinkles the more beautiful.

Of course Sarah would now be in the harem.  Imagine what the challenges of an uncharted relationship with God would do to her countenance, to her eyes.

The Torah unapologetically shows us that getting older is getting more beautiful because wisdom is beauty.

And so we read of their journey with God, with each other and with the people around them.  As Jews we are taught that everything begins with Lech Lecha, God approaching Abraham to take a journey.  Interestingly, we disconnect this parshah from what happened immediately before it. Abraham did not begin a journey, it is his father, Terach, who began the journey.  His father took the whole family and left the Chaldeans and began a journey of discovery. Then, in the midst of the journey, Terach died and the family stagnated. They dwelled in the place of his death and did not move forward.  That’s when God approaches Abraham and tells him he must journey forward. It is both a statement pulling toward movement as much as a statement objecting to stagnation.

It’s a parallel concept to Shabbat.  We are equally commanded to be productive for 6 days as we are commanded to refrain on Shabbat.  The positive and the negative balancing each other.

So when I wake up stiff in the morning and the words from Mick Jagger enter my mind, I stretch and get the blood flowing.  I remind myself that I can hum the tune and smile at the words, but getting old only gives me more insight to the new travels I will begin.

Abraham and Sarah dislodge themselves, late in their lives, and begin their journey from where Terach left off.  Every Jewish person inherits their own version of the ‘lech lecha’ journey, but we do not set our feet on a newly created road made just for us.  If we glance backward we will see the road has been paved behind us. Abraham and Sarah continue the journey begun by Terach.  

God has told them they must never stagnate as we learn that the journey of a life takes longer than a lifetime.

I Can Sing A Rainbow

by

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This week’s parshah is Noah, the story we all learned as children about the Great Flood, the Ark and the animals who came in twosie-twosies.

The story lends itself to fantastic imagery and grandeur.  And while that may speak well to children and their developmental stages of understanding, it is the nuances of the narrative that amaze me.

But before we get there, I think we can all appreciate how animals have enriched our lives.  I grew up with a myriad of pets that included many dogs, 1 cat, endless birds and tanks of fish.  I rescued wounded birds from our porch and nursed them back to health in shoe boxes in my closet. My parents never knew.  A few times the birds disappeared from my closet and I spent days quietly searching the house for where they may have flown…(hi mom).

I had a Mynah bird I named Mozart because I was so excited to hear him sing.  Mynah birds imitate sounds and since we had 2 dogs at that time, Mozart learned to bark.  I learned never to underestimate the free will of animals.

And so, we arrive at Noah and the ark of animals.

We know he collected animals to save from the impending doomsday flood.  We know it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and we know Noah sent a dove out to check on things and the dove brought an olive branch back, to show the earth had dried.  Peace was in place between God and humanity so the olive branch has become synonymous with peace.

Ah, if it were only that simple.

The story of Noah and the ark is a birth story.  It is an ark surrounded by water that is carrying the seeds of life within it.  It will take 40 days and 40 is the number of weeks it takes for a human baby to gestate.  And while the image of birth is strong and beautiful, the destructive image of the battle with God is devastating.

The Torah says that God decided to destroy the world because the ways of flesh had corrupted its nature.  Many commentaries have been written to explain what that might mean. Murder, mayhem, immorality, the list becomes a litany of horrors.  But the plainest of meanings is that life had denied its nature, had become inauthentic.

In essence, it means I don’t know who I am or where is my natural place.  Worse, I choose to defy who I am or my natural place. It only gets worse when I add that I am the image of God.  Now it means I don’t know, nor do I care about who, or what, God is. That means I have ignored God or, in the worst of cases, I challenge God.  If I challenge God, I have thrown down the gauntlet and I have now declared God my enemy.

And so, God picks up a divine weapon and wages a war.

When all is said and done, God puts down the weapon and declares that after every rainfall we will see God’s bow in the sky.  The word used is ‘bow’, as in ‘bow and arrow’. The rain from above were the arrows which God had slung to the earth with a divine bow.  It becomes the word ‘rainbow’ because it appears after the rain, but the arch in the image is the image of a weapon, the image of a bow. God disarms and places the weapon forever hanging, forever inactive.  That is the beauty of it and that is why it should comfort us.

That is the grandeur.

And a beautiful subtle moment is when Noah sends out 2 birds to see if things are dry.  The first bird is a raven, it is male. The Torah says it won’t go far from the ark, it keeps circling and coming back.  The Sages say it is protecting its mate and will not leave her. So Noah sends out a dove, a female. She returns with a branch.  She lets Noah know that she has what she needs to build a nest. That is when he knows all is good.

The Torah says that animals go into the ark but families emerge.  The raven, who would not leave his mate and the dove who seeks to secure her babies.  The present and the future.

So let’s keep singing the Noah children’s song, ‘it rained and poured for forty daysie-daysies…’ but never allow that to keep us from enjoying the wonder that is above and living with us.